The November issue of Maclean’s, which features essays on how every sector of Canadian life will be altered by artificial intelligence, left me with one essential takeaway: AI is a tool which, like any other, can be used for good or for evil, depending on the user’s intentions. When bad actors want to spread misinformation, AI can turbocharge that effort. When well-meaning engineers team up with social scientists to create a device to help elderly people feel less lonely, AI can provide a robot companion. AI itself is neither good nor bad. It all depends on who uses it and why.
One of the most exciting ways we’ll see AI enter our society, to the great benefit of Canadians, will be in powering up certain aspects of our depleted health-care system. Roxana Sultan, the chief data officer at the Vector Institute, writes convincingly about the ways AI is already making hospitals run better. She and her colleagues collaborated with St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto to implement an AI model that determines which inpatients are most at risk of escalating to the ICU or dying, based on metrics like age, biological sex and vital-sign measurements. The hospital implemented this algorithm in 2020, and it reduced ICU escalation and death by more than 20 per cent. The staff report that it has relieved stress and workload, helping them focus on their patients.
Sultan also has high hopes for how AI can help researchers determine treatments for patients with uncommon health conditions. She’s advocating for a privacy-safe way to compile data, across many hospitals, to have machines analyze specific patterns for rare diseases in subsets of the population. “The beauty of AI,” she explains in her essay, “is that we will be able to work with massive amounts of historical data from all types of people, which could open the door to more precise treatment of patients based on things like age, genetics and even socioeconomic status.”
—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief
